Hotfix Limits 'The Tall Man's Finger' to Zombie Dogs

New rounds of Diablo III hotfixes are rolling out, to take care of issues with skills and Legendary items that have not been working correctly. One fix is for the Legendary ring The Tall Man's Finger, which has the special power Zombie Dogs instead summons a single gargantuan dog with more damage and health than all other dogs combined. That special ability is only supposed to work for the Witch Doctor's pets from skills like Summon Zombie Dogs, but was active for many other class's pets. It dramatically increased the power of skills like the Barbarian's Call of the Ancients and the Crusader's Phalanx, making those pets do much more damage! The hotfix restricts the ring back to the Witch Doctor dogs, as originally designed. That's one of the changes that went in recently, or will be hotfixed shortly, in Diablo III.


The bug with the ring caused pets to become more powerful, across many skills and classes. A recent reddit thread had examples of the power of the ring, as it improperly buffed other pet skills. The trade-off with the ring for Witch Doctors is that it reduces all the Zombie Dogs to a single dog; when the ring was used with other pet skills, all the pets were there, and each one was more powerful than normal. Alongside the hotfix update, a blue post detailed the issue.

Here are the recent Patch 2.0.5 Hotfixes, since the last round. They include upcoming fixes to the ring and the 4-piece set bonus for Monks, as well as a couple other fixes that already went live.

Read on for other Blizzard Blues posts, including a request for feedback from Mac Diablo III players whose client crashes in Nephalem Rifts.


There have been reports from players that the Monk skill Deadly Reach - Scattered Blows was not properly doing Lightning damage for all 3 hits. That was addressed in the Bug Forum, as well as a post by Grimiku. From the testing so far, the QA team believes the skill is performing properly.

Another area of testing was with monster affix damage. There was a bug with Plagued recently, but that has been hotfixed; the rest of them are all apparently working correctly!

There has been an ongoing issue with the Diablo III client crashing in Nephalem Rifts, especially on certain Mac systems. The QA team is looking for information from players who run into this bug, so they can try to squash it once and for all!
Keep track of all the current issues by checking out the latest Blizzard Blues posts in our Blue Post Tracker or RSS feeds.